


yaw

by xXstaystillXx



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Horror, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:16:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24380419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXstaystillXx/pseuds/xXstaystillXx
Summary: “I think he’s dead,” you blurt, and you know how bad that sounds but that’s all you can get past the knot someone’s tied your throat into, what a sick fucking prank, “I think he’s dead, he’s not moving, his head—”
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way/Mikey Way, Frank Iero/Mikey Way, Gerard Way/Mikey Way
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	yaw

**Author's Note:**

> man im just on a roll with the corpses huh

Frank sounds like he’s barely awake when he picks up the phone, grey and tired and run-ragged. You’d feel bad about waking him up any other time but now.

“Hello?” Shifting, cotton-soft noises in the background, either sockfeet on the floor or Frank rucking up his pajamas to scratch at his stomach, stretch; you can see it so clearly, in a weird, hazy, involuntary daydream kind of way, like your brain is latching on to any distraction it can get. 

“Frank,” you say. It comes out a crackly paper-thin creak. “I— I don’t know what to do." If you knew why you were whispering, you’d stop. 

“What? Who is this?” He says, and you can almost hear him squinting, trying to puzzle out your voice. “Mikey?” 

You nod, uselessly, swallow, brace your arm against the car at eye level and plant your forehead into it as if that’s going to keep you stable, anchored. The headlights, they’re bleeding into your retinas and even when you close your eyes you’ll be able to see right through your lids, orange anatomical glow like putting a flashlight against someone’s cheek to watch it shine through when they open their mouth. You don’t think you’re blinking much. “I can’t. I don’t know what to do.”

“Mikes, tell me what’s up,” he says, concerned. You hate to hear him sound like that. Slowly, you thunk your forehead against your arm like you’re keeping a downbeat, even, even, skin-on-skin-on-bone. You wish you had a jacket, you wish you had a blanket, you wish it wasn’t 80 degrees because something needs to be freezing, even if it’s only you. 

“I—I—I—” you say and it just keeps going like that until you cut yourself off and start again, tongue-tied, “I need help, Frank, I don’t—”

“You don’t know what to do, yeah, I got that. What happened?” 

The breeze whistles past your ears, sounding like nightbugs. 

“Mikey? I need an answer, man.” 

“I think he’s dead,” you blurt, and you know how bad that sounds, what a sick fucking joke this is, “I think he’s dead, he’s not moving, his head—”

“Jesus, Mikes.” You hear him turn away from the receiver and fuck up his hair, shaking his fingers through it. You can tell because he does it so often and that wry rustle-noise is familiar through repetition. "Tell me where you are, okay?" 

“I think— 204, near Eagle Rock, I think I passed a mile marker.”

You can hear him breathing, moving. Crackly hisses of static. “Okay, okay. I can work with that. Hold the fuck on, Mikes, I’ll get Gerard to drive, be there as fast as I can—” 

“ _No_. No, no. You can’t. Gerard can’t, I don’t want him,” you say, and it’s a goddamn abortion of a sentence but it’s all you can do. You jog your leg without trying to and, faintly, way-down, the loud round sound of your boot on tarmac startles you, like you shouldn’t be able to make that much noise because you’re about to melt away into the air like a fairytale bogie. 

Frank’s talking again. “I can’t drive, man, you know no one else is close enough. Unless you want me to show up with your parents or something—”

“No!” you say, loud, childish, breaking the whisper barrier and startling yourself again. Snot starts dripping out of your nose and smudges across your bare arm.

“Yeah. Hang tight,” he says, and then the line clicks dead, and you stand there for a long time with your arm pressing a thick pink line into your face and your cell phone dangling from your hand, going numb. 

——

You’ve sat down by the time they pull up, lukewarm metal pressing fabric-fold faultlines into your back. It's humid and nasty and you feel coated with a grubby layer of sweat that's getting thicker the longer you sit here; you'd have a better time of it waiting in the car, but how the hell could you make yourself get back in there? You just killed a man sitting in the front seat— and there’s no question about it, no _I think_ anymore, not when he hasn’t moved for upward of twenty minutes and there’s a slick candy-apple red puddle growing around his head. 

That in itself, the stillness, the knowledge, is making you have slippery paranoid thoughts that you can _smell_ him, the rot seizing him, eating him away like a high-school science experiment with nails and acid. You would sit inside the car to get away from it but you can’t look out the windshield again without seeing the way his body flash-snapped up in the blare of headlights. All bleached out on one side, you didn’t even have a split second to see what his face looked like before he was bouncing off— a sickly, sickly, sickly comical jitter-flail, your stomach gapes empty— and going twisted under the left front wheel, and oh, god, you had to back off him. You had to put the car in reverse and you couldn’t even do that fast enough, you just fucking sat there feeling the engine run like a kind of beast beneath you, and that’s what it was like, it was growling, it felt like— like a fucking engine block, your body shaking from the vibrations and shaking from the fear and the way the car was cocked lopsided from the body, jacked-up, blisters forming in your throat from all the boiling terror you’d been swallowing. It’s your mom’s fucking car, and you made it haunted. 

The car turns the whip-curve of the road, too far into your lane. For a perfect moment of petrified stillness you’re convinced this is Karma, that it’s your turn to be bleached out and spun under a tire tread, but it lopes over the curb and grits to a stop on the shoulder too far from where you’re huddled to ever hit you. You see the shitty stoner-smear red-white paintjob and it just screams Gerard, reminds you all at once of him in the driveway with a can of spraypaint and it hurts; your brother is the last person you want to see, the last person you want to get all tangled up in this pumpkin-gut stringy terror, like offal, like clotting cement.

Their headlights, your headlights; quadruple spotlight on the limp man laying in the road. You didn’t take the key all the way out of the ignition because you were hoping you could sit here on the side of the road, in the gravel, the sticks and dust long enough for the battery to run dry, and— isn’t that a torture method, car batteries? Jumper cables? Skin closed between metal teeth?

A car door clunks open and you flinch, then flinch again at the sound of voices, low, muttering, riveted through with apprehension and the tones that comes with prayer. Tragedy-pitched. Never-could-have-seen-it-coming tones. You stupidly think the phrase _sudden death round_ and don’t look up from your shoes tucked into the gravel. All the headlights are making your eyes feel huge and reflective, twice as full-up on light, wax in a lava lamp glowing from the inside. 

“Mikey!” Frank calls, not shouting but just enough over the threshold of what you can take, and then again, again, _Mikey, Mikey, Mikey,_ like there's ten of you running around to tack down. Between his footsteps and yelling and the rustling, snapping sound of him tugging at his clothes— the toy frank you keep in your head shoving his hands in and out of his pockets, untucking and re-tucking his shirt, letting his jacket slide down his shoulders and then whipping it back up, you know all that's what he does when he's _freaking out, man, like so tripped out this sucks_ — it's so loud you can't hear the cicadas screaming against the trees. You let the bugs do the talking for you; you don’t say anything. You think you spent all your power of speech on the phone call, for now, until you get some kind of recharge; until someone clips jumper cables to your skin and shocks you back to life, like torture, like a roadside mechanic. 

They start muttering again, walking, rounding the car on the wrong side, driver’s side. They pause at the body; you think you hear retching, maybe a few words to catch, _is he even here where is he god god god_. Gerard’s voice, sick whispering, irrational panic like that time years ago when you were walking home at 12:37 at night stoned to the gills and he saw the moonlight wavering off the dull silver-grey side of a mile marker and he freaked out, dug his fingernails into your arm through your coat, went _mikey mikey mikey mikey oh my god_ because he thought the trick of the light was a person walking towards you and he didn’t know what kind of crazy weirdo would be out walking the back road that late, other than you two, of course, ha ha. 

You hear Frank say _i don’t fucking know get your fingers out of my arm jesus gerard _. You hear_ we need to call the cops we need to find him_ and that’s what forces you to open your mouth, to say “No,” into your shoes like they’re misbehaving, not the ultimatum you meant it to be; you hear sneakers in the gravel other than yours and you say “ _No,_ ” again, louder, because if you heard the start of a 9-1-1 call next you think you’d get back in that haunted car and force yourself to drive until you found a cliff you could tip off the edge of. 

You hear "Oh, fuck," and then Gerard's throwing himself down to your level, ripping open his jeans on the gravel, rocks flying and smacking into your calves, the crease of your waist; he's on you with his arms so heavy-heavy-heavy and awkward on your shoulders, his hair sticking in your eye and going up your nose. He crushes you in, vice-grip that you think is gonna dislocate your arm, and you can't twist yourself around enough to clutch him back but you don't think you'd deserve to even if you could. 

"Don't _fucking_ scare me like that, why didn't you say something, we thought you—"

"I didn't want you here," you say, over him, "you weren't. I didn't."

Gerard starts to say something like _it doesn't matter_ even though this clearly deeply horribly does, it matters like a heart attack, but he doesn't get a chance to lie to you more before Frank's crouching in front of you his knees out and sharp. 

He says "Give him some air, shit, man, you're smothering him," even though you badly want to be smothered. 

Gerard turns his head. More of his hair scrubs into your face. He says, "I thought I told you to call 911," but he lets go anyway and you feel like you just had your skeleton ripped out. 

"Are you fucking kidding? We can't call the cops. They'll take one look at this and throw Mikey in some— some godforsaken crack-dealer kid's-club juvie cell, dude, we fucking need to fix this."

"Don't start with your bullshit, dude, it was an accident, they wouldn't—"

"What fucking proof do we have? Huh? How do we spin this? Best case scenario, they're gonna say was manslaughter and they're gonna throw him in juvie, fucking _juvie_ man, you know the horror stories, look at him."

"Shut up. Shut the hell up. You don't know what you're talking about," Gerard says, and his breath is whistling; then you stop being able to understand them because Frank's screaming and Gerard's screaming and you're like a peaked mic, that’s all the noise you can take. They're up nose to nose submerged in the headlights, pinned down in the headlights, spotlight and their dark dark clothes like photo negatives pasted over their bodies. You can’t understand what he’s saying but Gerard always talks with his hands, flings them around so it looks violent even before Frank throws the first punch; it catches Gerard in the jaw and his head snaps, just like the man's head snapped back when you hit him. 

You stand up, Pinocchio with his strings yanked, not a real boy, and jerkily, woodenly shove between them with your head down and arms out like, fucking, you don't know, like you're trying to unlock the heads of jousting deer because their antlers are tangled and they'll break their necks this way. Someone hits you, just a narrow elbow jab to your ear; someone stomps on your foot. You think they're just going fistfight with you there like an idiot monkey-in-the-middle, they'll headlock and gore you, but you fist the front of Gerard's jacket and shove as hard as you can; you hear _Mikey!_ , he stumbles back, and then that’s it, they're apart. 

Tears drip off the end of your nose and catch all the dust in the air on the way down. You think, _how the fuck can they do this now there's a dead man five foot from where we're fucking standing_ , and you’d like to tell them, but you don’t trust anything you could say to come out in one piece. 

Frank's panting sounds the same as Gerard's, just ragged tearing noises in the silence. Just the creak of Gerard's jacket wadded up and strained into your fist. No one speaks.

Frank sits down hard on the hood of your car, pats his pockets and digs around, pulls out a loose cigarette, crooked and wrinkled like an umbilical cord. When he tries to light it his lighter won't catch, just scrapes and scrapes and scrapes. You're still shaking like a newborn fawn with your hand clutching Gerard's jacket and he's still watching Frank, mouth tight, eyes wet and angry, and Frank throws his lighter and it sparks off the pavement and he stomps on it, once, sharp little crack. 

He puts his head in his hands. He says, "We need to hide the body.” 

"Okay," you croak, “okay.” 

Gerard opens his angry tight mouth but you look at him, and you say "Please," and he closes it again. 

"The trunk, right? Put it in the trunk." Frank starts pacing, stepping an orbit around the outstretched arm, laying on the pavement with its hand a blanched starfish, "We can— Jesus. Where the fuck do we take it?" He stalls, like he doesn't want to start, to move, but he doesn't know what else to say. 

You push your hands across your face, feeling the skin clung to your cheeks ball up under the heels of your palms. Your stomach hurts and it seems targeted; you can't let your head slip away for one single second because the little slip of red and whitish pink that was sliding out of the man's skull when you first stumbled out of the car settled in your gut, it's chewing through you, that medieval execution method with the rats in the hot metal box— just the reverse of zombies, someone's brain eating you, ha ha ha. 

Maybe you just need to throw up and get it over with. 

Gerard says something to the back of your head. You turn to him and he looks, just, flat, flat line mouth, hair straight, lank, dripping over his flat-soda still eyes. "Eagle rock."

Frank twists the unlit cigarette between his fingers. It snaps. He doesn’t even blink: he says, "What?" as if he's talking to a two year old and oh, you wish he would quit being bitchy like that.

"Eagle rock," he says again. 

"Yeah, okay, what the fuck about Eagle Rock?"

"We bury it in the woods. Hunting season isn't for months— we go off the path, no one's going to stumble across it until winter."

Frank scrubs at his hair, strands whipping over his fingers, head almost between his knees. "Alright, okay. Eagle Rock. No one fucking goes there anymore.”

Gerard nods, starts to say something, but you open your mouth at the same time as him and you’re just a touch louder, more frantic. 

"Him," you say.

"What?"

"Him. He’s— he’s not an _it_ ," you say.

Frank looks up at you, craned out; you know, suddenly, a premonition, that someday they're going to bury him alive and you will be the one to hear him scratching his fingernails bloody on the casket door and you will dig him up with your hands and haul him out of the grave, one arm over your shoulder like a house fire survivor, or a posed war propaganda photo.

He says: "Whatever.” 

——

The man's skull is seedy mush in the back, shattered and flaked, oozing gouts of blood and brain. Frank takes his shoulders and tries to lift him. The second his head leaves the ground, a baseball-sized wad oozes out, looking like chewed-up pork; some lobe you can’t name drooling out onto the tarmac. Some kind of memory mixing with the road-grit. 

“Oh, god,” he says. You’ve never seen someone turn green in real life before. “Dude, give me your hoodie.” 

Gerard— looking on, staring into the woods and smoking, his own silent protest— goes “Fuck you, use your own.” 

“You see me wearing one, asshole?” and he’s right, because he gave you his ten minutes ago when you started shivering even though it still isn’t cold. 

He glares, just for a second, and then unzips his very favorite Slipknot hoodie like he’s pulling the ripcord on a chainsaw and throws it at Frank. It _whap_ -s him in the face, his hands full already; when he flinches another blob of brain falls and lands right on the toe of his shoe.

You pull the jacket off Frank. You tune out whatever he’s spitting at Gerard and wrap its head— his head— the head, whatever, you just do it, trying not to touch anything directly but keep it all in there (and somehow it reminds you of wrapping paper, like Christmas, middle of summer but you’ve got carols stuck in your head because you never went to church enough to remember any hymns and you guess Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is the closest you know to prayer). 

You step back. Gerard looks at his hoodie wound around the man's head like a turban. He looks at the blood drying on what small sliver of white bald head is still visible, and he looks at the tiny fragments of brain and blood that stuck to your fingers as you did it. He wobbles, pale, then step-stumbles over to the ditch and folds at the waist and dry heaves. 

Frank stares after him, horrified. His grip loosens just slack enough; the fabric of the man's shirt slips from his fingers as if it has suddenly become slick, and his head makes a horrid rotten melon noise on the concrete. 

Frank says, “Don't you dare barf— fucking DNA evidence, fucking DNA, Gerard, don't," and he claps a hand over his mouth and his eyes water and he swallows like it's the worst thing he's ever done. Again, such sick comedy. You get the insane urge to laugh.

“Dee-En-Ay,” you mutter, to yourself. Sounding it out. Nobody hears you do it. 

You get his feet. Frank hikes him up by the armpits. You’re almost there, clumsily crouch-walking backwards, the muscles in your back twinging hot even though you’ve technically got the light end, when Frank stops short, almost causing you to drop the body again— you don’t think you could take another deadweight smack of limbs against blacktop— and says, “Shit, is he gonna fit?” 

You crane around and look at the trunk. He’s right. The space looks far too short, too narrow. 

“If you say we need to break his legs or some other fucking line you got from a cop drama," you say, and let it hang there because you don't have anything to follow it up. Threats seem cheap. 

“Jesus, okay,” Frank says, "I wasn't gonna," adjusts his grip, the body’s tee shirt sliding slack under his hands.

“He’ll fit,” you say, to Frank and Gerard at once, to no one, to the body, maybe. “He’ll fit.”

He fits. 

——

The drive rushes past you like riverwater around a rock. 

You’re not seatbelted or anything, just heaped up against the back of Gerard’s seat because you took out the rear seats to make room for a drum kit two weeks ago; you imagine that you can feel his heartbeat through the stuffing and metal and upholstery. Here, that’s not the mechanics of the car buzzing and rubbing together and putting off vibrations, it’s just your brother’s panicked heart, so fast and so scared you can’t feel the pauses between beats (which you understand, you really do because that’s how yours feels right now, how it may feel for the rest of forever). 

“How much further?” Frank says. You look at him, all tucked up in shotgun with his boots on the dash. He's staring out the window. One strand of his hair is curled into a perfect question mark on his right temple. You’d like to answer him. You don’t. 

Neither does your brother.

“Fine.” 

He scrunches down further and starts up that nasty habit of his: spitting his gum almost all the way out of his mouth, then chewing it back in with his front teeth. The radio isn’t on so you just listen to him do it, watching his jaw work out of the corner of your eye. Repetitive, snappy click of spit and lips and spearmint chewing gum. 

A few blurry more minutes and then you’re there. Gerard stops the car. The road— not even a road, really, just a scrubbed-up gravel path— into the woods ends far too soon; at the end of it you can still see the blank black tarmac of the highway through the gaps in the trees. The second you’re not moving you miss it, sitting along for the ride, being placid and passive and staring at the dark rush of the world outside.

“Now what?” you say, feeling a sharp disconnect, like this is a flimsy pulp-paper choose-your-own-adventure novel. All you have to do is wait for someone to call out a page number to turn to. 

Neither of them say anything; Frank, already stomping out his pins and needles into the forest floor, glances at you and shrugs. Gerard just reaches down to the floormat and pulls the lever that pops the trunk. 

You're climbing out of the backseat when you step on something soft. You can't see shit— the domelight back here burnt out ages ago— so you just feel around until your fingers hit dusty knit. 

You sit back down and pull the beanie on. It's black, and too close to your head, and it makes your eyes seem huge and dark-rimmed, mildewing, dug out of your skull in sockets deep enough to hold water. You look at the hair pushed down to fringe your neck, the shadows under your nose, and you think _this is what i looked like when i was seventeen and i'd just killed a man like he was a deer running across the road_ as if you're already so much older and browsing through a photo album instead of looking at your cut-off head reflected in the back window.

"Frankie?" 

"Yeah?" 

You're silent. Your floating head starts tugging strands of your bangs in place with floating fingertips. In the faint background of the reflection you can see Gerard, a pale grey smudge through the windshield, leaned up against the side door with the pale orange smudge of a cherry burning an inch out from his mouth.

"Dude, what do you want?"

Quietly; "Get in."

Frank sighs. He comes 'round and climbs in the back with one hand on the top of the doorframe, and then he's there. He’s next to you, his head is floating now, too. 

"You good?" he asks, sounding worried, sounding tired and ten years older than he should. 

You've been chewing the plastic-wrap thin skin off your chapped lips and they sting when you kiss him, little open wounds that you can just barely taste. 

His lips don’t move— ventriloquism— but his hand comes up to brush against the side of your tee shirt, just once. You know you’re grabbing at him, pawing, desperate animal motions; the faint warm bulge of his crotch against your palm, your fingers gripping his forearm, his shoulder, the back of his neck. Sweat-damp short curled hair. The way his stomach shrinks away from your touch. 

“Oh,” says Gerard, a transmission from Mars. 

You can feel Frank’s lashes flick against yours when his eyes fly open and he yanks away, does this strangled _huuh—uuhh_ gasp as if you’d been holding his head underwater. 

“Mikey,” he says, but he’s looking at Gerard, all scared, and you can feel his heartbeat pick up because you’re still holding his fucking cock through his jeans and his pulse is ticking right there, “I— Fuck, what?”

“I don’t care,” you say, not knowing what it is you don’t care about, just that you need to say it, make him fucking hear it, “please. Just— we have to, I, I—” 

“It’s okay,” Gerard says, announcer on that far-away mars-radio giving you the good news, and there’s hands tucked under your arms, pulling you back. “Mikes, I got you, it’s okay,” and you feel like you’re breaking apart just from hearing that. 

“Please,” you say, “I’m sorry, fuck,” whining, pitful and hateful, Gerard solid and weighted underneath you, his shoes clunking against the doorframe as he clambers in with no hands, tugging you facefirst to him once he's settled. You just fucking go with it; isn’t that how they do it in slaughterhouses? Lead them to a hallway and push them together until they’ve got a blade at their necks? 

“I just gotta know.” 

“I got you, Mikes, it’s okay.” 

“I gotta,” you say, thick and blurred, clotting against his shirt. Against his chest, you're just close enough to the door that when you look up you can see the dark, hectic ceiling of leaves, gaps of the night sky. He’s whispering something at Frank over your head, stroking your hair even as he does it.

“That’s fucked up— you’re fucked up, man, I’m—”

“Get the fuck over here,” he says, louder, and you look up again and now all your can see is the white soft underside of his chin, how close to tears he is, too. 

Frank hesitates, hands out and helpless; Gerard has to mouth _come on_ to get him to knee-walk over. He comes in close, close enough both of you are just about laying on Gerard. He pushes his nose into the back of your neck. You twitch, hard.

“C’mere. C’mon, you wanted to,” he says, whispers, and you turn over. You know you’re still snotty and red-cheeked but you mash your face into his anyway, looping your arms around his neck like a fucking girl would. You’re so far past letting that stop you. 

Movement, heat; your hands feel gummed over with the dead man's stillness, his rot, numb and too-big to be tacked onto the ends of your arms. Your head keeps orbiting between _we can’t fucking do this_ and _we need to do this_ and there’s no “I” in there, anymore, just the collective. Just your little collection; you know Frank inside and out right now, his inner workings spread out into the air he’s panting at your ear, in the humidity-damp crush of his body against yours, in the switchbulb flashes of heat arcing through your guts because you know he’s feeling the same thing, you’re doing it to each other, you’re here, he’s here, and Gerard—

Gerard’s here, too. He’s still underneath you. If you could stop your balance-beam pushpull with Frank for a second you’d turn to him and you aren’t sure what that means, what you think about it; the only thing you’re sure of is that he’s still and somehow heavy even though you’re on top of him and not the other way around, like a low-pressure pocket of air or the feeling that puddles in your lungs when you step down a drop-off in a pond. 

As if he’s reading your thoughts as well as you wanna think you’re reading his, Frank pulls away, just a little, enough to place his mouth on your brother’s. He hesitates, he stutter-stops, but he does it. His aim is off— looking up, you can see how unaligned the soft white vulnerable undersides of their chins are— but Gerard takes his face up in his hands and drags him down, in, Frank's knee slipping free of where he’d braced it on a fold of torn carpeting and banging into your thigh. You can see Gerard’s tongue slip past his lips. Somehow, you’re faintly shocked that it’s a slip of pink and not some other color, as it should be. 

A fleck of spit lands on your forehead; “Wait, wait,” and Frank’s looking down at you, “Wait,” but you tug at the collar of his shirt and bring him in. Then you’re kissing him, too, licking his lips like you’re looking for something. He makes a rucked-up noise and it echoes down the hole of your throat, rattles around, crumples somewhere down in your guts, a paper airplane thrown out into a hailstorm. 

Gerard says, “Guys.” 

You keep kissing Frank.

Gerard says, “Mikey,” bent over and speaking into the crown of your head. You stop kissing Frank. You go to stare up at him again but he’s too close, it ends with his lips on your forehead. 

Talking into your forehead: “I’m sorry, we— we need to go, it’ll be light out soon.” 

“What?” says Frank, then, “oh, fuck,” after he sits back on his haunches to look at the dashboard clock. His chin is shiny with spit, or sweat. You stay down and try not to think of anything.

“We have to,” Gerard says. He’s holding both your hands in your lap, now, but all you can see are the rusty streaks across your fingernails.


End file.
